Today
is a new day for the American people. There's a new wireless 4G
contender in town, whether you believe it or not. Yesterday,
T-Mobile began
running television ads that lambaste the iPhone 4 on AT&T's
network and while boasting about its own MyTouch 4G on "America's
largest 4G network."

The
30-second spot mocks the famous Apple ads featuring Justin Long ("Hi,
I'm a Mac.") and John Hodgeman ("Hi, I'm a PC.")
standing in white space, arguing about what they can and can't do. In
the T-Mobile spot, a fair-skinned woman, much younger than Catherine
Zeta-Jones, wearing a magenta- and white-striped dress introduces
herself as a MyTouch 4G and boasts about her ability to video-chat
anywhere with T-Mobile's 4G network. Next to her is a a blonde man in
a suit who introduces himself as an iPhone 4, except he's struggling
to carry an older bald guy on his back.

"Who's
your friend?" MyTouch asks.

"Oh,
that's the old AT&T network," iPhone 4 replies.

"That'll
slow you down," MyTouch says.

"That's
the price I pay for 3G speed," iPhone 4 replies.

"Bummer,"
says MyTouch.

AT&T
has long been touting "the nation's fastest 3G network" tag
in its own ads. Thus, the war of words has commenced.

AT&T
has never
been a fan of T-Mobile claiming 4G speeds. And there has
been much debate about what 4G really is, anyway. According to
the International
Telecommunication Union Radiocommunications (ITU-R),
4G "must have target peak data rates of up to approximately
100 Mbps for high mobility such as mobile access." But only
WiMax 2 and LTE-Advanced will be capable of those kinds of speeds,
neither of which we can expect to see before 2013. If following that
standard, Sprint/Clearwire's burgeoning WiMax network,
currently marketed
as "4G," truly isn't. The same can be said about
both Verizon and AT&T's
upcoming LTE networks. The bottom line is that "4G,"
to the average consumer, is merely a branding mechanism. The "MyTouch
HSPA+" just doesn't have the same ring.

4G
is about performance and today T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network is
delivering 4G speeds that match and often beat WiMAX and are readily
comparable to what early LTE will deliver. Our 4G network is capable
of theoretical speeds up to 21Mbps and we have seen average download
speeds approaching five Mbps on our myTouch 4G phone in some cities
with peak speeds of nearly 12 Mbps. Further, independent
reviewers have seen average download speeds on our
webConnect Rocket between 5 and 8 Mbps with peak speeds up to
8-10Mbps. The footprint of our 4G service is not something that
competitors are going to match anytime soon, and starting today, we
will begin marketing our network advantage with TV commercials
advertising ‘America’s Largest 4G Network’ from T-Mobile.

"Consumers
do not understand the technical alphabet soup of technologies
involved in 4G, but for our purposes we define WiMAX, LTE and HSPA+
as 4G technologies," added Chris Nicoll, distinguished research
fellow, Yankee Group. “HSPA+ is evolving a far more ambitious and
long-term road map than was originally envisioned."

With
the addition of six new cities (Chicago, Ill.; Colorado Springs,
Colo.; Ft. Wayne, Ind.; Louisville, Ky.; and Raleigh-Durham and
Wilmington, N.C.), T-Mobile's HSPA+ services are now available in
more than 75 metropolitan areas.

In
the past, AT&T unsuccessfully
tried to sue Verizon for Big Red's television ads that
mockingly boasted,"There's a map for that," and pitted the
two coverage maps against each other (Verizon visually being the
clear winner). It will be interesting to see how the iPhone's carrier
-- or is it vice versa? -- responds.

"The Space Elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing" -- Sir Arthur C. Clarke